1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a report searching apparatus that searches a report created in the past and a method for searching the report.
2. Description of the Related Art
Because medical practice is segmented into specialized fields, it is common to request a specialist to interpret a medical image photographed with an image diagnosis apparatus. A radiologist specialized in image interpretation displays a medical image requested for interpretation on a monitor such as a liquid crystal display or a CRT display, and summarizes the interpretation results in a radiology report.
The radiologist displays a medical image to be compared with an interpretation target image, or displays a previous radiology report involving a similar case and a diagnosed disease name, thereby using as a reference.
A radiology report created in the past is archived in an archive device including a hard disk (HD), etc. In order to read out a radiology report for reference from the archive device, for example, keyword search using an inputted search word is executed with a searching apparatus (e.g., refer to Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2007-293521).
When searching a radiology report including a similar case or diagnosed disease name, a conventional searching apparatus executes full-text search. Then, the searching apparatus lists all radiology reports including an inputted word as text data.
This full-text search referring to text data in radiology reports may decrease the efficiency of interpretation because it takes a substantially long search time. Further, even when the full-text search is completed after a substantial amount of time, the listed radiology reports may vary in referential value, and it is hard to distinguish which radiology reports are useful. Thus, since it is necessary to display the listed radiology reports one by one and check the contents thereof even after the search, a substantial amount of time may be wasted in finding a desired reference even after the search, and the efficiency in interpretation may be lowered. Besides, since it is difficult to find an appropriate reference from among a substantial number of listed reports, the interpreter may fail to check a radiology report that should be used as a reference actually.